Someone (an old man) once said that the first casualty of war is truth. Through Body of Empire‘s painstaking disinterment and resurrection of the actual truth of war, Mariko Nagai suggests—or rather demands—a greater and more grim reality: that the first casualty of war—and also the last, and longest suffering—are women. Nagai illuminates, through the insidious fog of history, the inner and outer lives—the dreams, the nightmares, the subjection, the subjectivity, and the unimaginable will—of nearly one hundred years of women, and in doing so, has committed an astonishing act of counter-erasure. (Brandon Shimoda) In Body of Empire, Mariko Nagai fearlessly and irrepressibly exposes the objectification, violation and consumption of women’s bodies from the late 19th century to post-WWII. Nagai’s indelible reclamation of the Japanese sex worker humanizes the courageous women who were rendered into commodities and consigned to history’s footnotes. The book’s powerful narrative of courage and survival traces legalized, volitional and forced prostitution against a backdrop of patriarchy and imperialism. In colonial outposts, frontier towns and domestically, Nagai uncovers women who have been lost or silenced. This extraordinary bricolage includes numerous historical documents, such as photographs, postcards, interviews, lists, statistics, surveys, journalism and memoir. Nagai writes, “No one wants to be doing this, but women do. People do everything and anything to survive.” History lives in the body, and Body of Empire reminds us that international politics is gendered as it recovers the women who laid down their bodies for their country. (Cassandra Atherton) Mariko Nagai’s Body of Empire begins as an examination of the role of Japanese prostitution in the rise of Imperial Japan, where women, sold by their own families or tricked under the guise of national service, are conscripted as nothing but bodies and barely even that. Male soldiers, supplied with “Assault Number One,” government–issued condoms distributed in the name of the Emperor on behalf of Japan’s expanding power and might, invade one country after the next. Chinese women, Burmese women, Korean women are churned through the gears of imperial ambition. But when America occupies a defeated Japan, it becomes clear that Nagai’s investigation is not only or mainly about Japan itself but rather more broadly about empire and the gendered damage it wreaks. When Japanese men watch their American counterparts take their places in a war on women’s bodies it becomes clear that women, regardless of country, live in an occupied state. A harrowing, essential work, Body of Empire uses first person accounts of the men and women of war to show how men fighting men reduce woman after woman to nothing more than sacrificial bodies, never meant to speak for themselves, let alone hope or dream, or god forbid, to act, decide, and govern. (David Naimon) A haunted and inspired work, Body of Empire interrogates the ways in which women’s bodies have been forced to hold the ambitions and desires of empire, and the need to unbind these maps from the flesh. What maps you?, one might ask, so easily forgetting that the map is not the territory, and that a woman’s body should not be a container for trauma. In the collaborative conjuration of women’s wounds through these brilliant & devastating texts, might we be able to extract these calcifications and bring to light / in light in order to facilitate a gradual healing? (Janice Lee)